Its 1230 in the morning on a Wednesday night… its my ‘alone’ night for Mila left me unattended to sick thoughts and ill behavior… I’ve taken full advantage of the free time – got home at 9PM from work… turned on television… watched it for what amounts to two hours and forty five minutes… thought of doing something productive… took a shower… had a lovely cherry compote from Brighton Beach… thought about smoking a cigarette… decided to err on the side of health… and now finally decided to do something meaningful and important – write in my blog…
Now for the thought of the day… and how jealous I’ve been feeling lately of something… jealous of what – its hard to say… nothing in specific… like the thought of Magnus being stuck in Cairo traffic in a filthy Lada cab while a fat turbaned man went at it with a particularly stubborn mule in the middle of the busiest intersection in all of Egypt… or my dear friend Matjaz traveling up and down the safe and sane region we know as the Balkans… yes… traveling up and down that wondrous and diverse land conquered by Slavs and Greeks and Turks and probably a whole bunch of others in-between… trying to meet important people and get the right contracts to develop a thing called commercial real estate… yes… imagine… there you are in Sarajevo… say in 1994… in the middle of some bombed out building… smoking cheap cigarettes and eating grass (cuz there aint no food around)… a careful Serbian sniper just took out a grandma on her morning stroll just a block away… and you sit there and think about life and how things will be when all this madness is over… when they finally clean up the bomb fragments and blood stains and random shoes from the cracked pavement… when you and your old friend Branko from the other side of town can have some good rakiya again… for you see Branko turned out to be a Serb and is now killing Bosnians… for reasons he probably don’t know… and you are killing Serbians… just like Branko for reasons you don’t know… and it all goes on and on and you think and wonder in those terrible hours
of where its going to get everybody in long ten years…
And ten long years pass…. And Serbs and Bosnians are still not friends but at least have the decency to hate each other from afar… and through newspaper caricatures… and the bombed out building where you were smoking your cigarettes (rolled from that caricatured newspaper) and eating grass… well now its one of the top investment stories in all of the EMEA region (Europe/ Middle East/ Africa for the ignorant ones out there)… a nice private equity firm showed up and bought up the property… sometime before they paid some bribes… and a long time afterwards they will continue to pay some bribes… the local politicians are ecstatic – the country is growing! The local proletariat is happy – they have work! And the local women are thrilled – Victoria’s secret is coming to Sarajevo, along with Kmart, Wendy’s and McDonalds… and shit for the rebuilding effort, they crazy Swedes are even opening up an Ikea on the outskirts of town… they are claiming to be using aged wood from burned Muslim villages to make furniture that is both modern and convenient… and oh yes… even Home Depot is right around the corner… yes… the first one in all of former Yugoslavia… for how are angry former soldiers to occupy themselves but to build houses and other contraptions with their bare hands (you cant expect them to waste time on metrosexual non-sense like Ikea… now can you?)… and everyone is happy… and everyone is thrilled… for that bombed out, rotten building (and about a dozen other ones all around) have now become a giant shopping mall with horrendous music, stale air and uniformly happy sales staff… even goofballs from EBRD showed up, taking grinning pictures next to Ronald McDonald and exclaiming “Europe is finally coming together” in thick German accents… the only ones unhappy are the town drunks… for what good are shopping malls to them – old rotten burned out buildings work much better for their purposes…
And that’s what my friend Matjaz is doing… building a better tomorrow… for the people of today… And I am jealous… for forget all the slogans and all the construction and all the investment and all the money… I want to know what the town drunks are doing, now that they’ve lost their base and home…
Now for the thought of the day… and how jealous I’ve been feeling lately of something… jealous of what – its hard to say… nothing in specific… like the thought of Magnus being stuck in Cairo traffic in a filthy Lada cab while a fat turbaned man went at it with a particularly stubborn mule in the middle of the busiest intersection in all of Egypt… or my dear friend Matjaz traveling up and down the safe and sane region we know as the Balkans… yes… traveling up and down that wondrous and diverse land conquered by Slavs and Greeks and Turks and probably a whole bunch of others in-between… trying to meet important people and get the right contracts to develop a thing called commercial real estate… yes… imagine… there you are in Sarajevo… say in 1994… in the middle of some bombed out building… smoking cheap cigarettes and eating grass (cuz there aint no food around)… a careful Serbian sniper just took out a grandma on her morning stroll just a block away… and you sit there and think about life and how things will be when all this madness is over… when they finally clean up the bomb fragments and blood stains and random shoes from the cracked pavement… when you and your old friend Branko from the other side of town can have some good rakiya again… for you see Branko turned out to be a Serb and is now killing Bosnians… for reasons he probably don’t know… and you are killing Serbians… just like Branko for reasons you don’t know… and it all goes on and on and you think and wonder in those terrible hours
of where its going to get everybody in long ten years…And ten long years pass…. And Serbs and Bosnians are still not friends but at least have the decency to hate each other from afar… and through newspaper caricatures… and the bombed out building where you were smoking your cigarettes (rolled from that caricatured newspaper) and eating grass… well now its one of the top investment stories in all of the EMEA region (Europe/ Middle East/ Africa for the ignorant ones out there)… a nice private equity firm showed up and bought up the property… sometime before they paid some bribes… and a long time afterwards they will continue to pay some bribes… the local politicians are ecstatic – the country is growing! The local proletariat is happy – they have work! And the local women are thrilled – Victoria’s secret is coming to Sarajevo, along with Kmart, Wendy’s and McDonalds… and shit for the rebuilding effort, they crazy Swedes are even opening up an Ikea on the outskirts of town… they are claiming to be using aged wood from burned Muslim villages to make furniture that is both modern and convenient… and oh yes… even Home Depot is right around the corner… yes… the first one in all of former Yugoslavia… for how are angry former soldiers to occupy themselves but to build houses and other contraptions with their bare hands (you cant expect them to waste time on metrosexual non-sense like Ikea… now can you?)… and everyone is happy… and everyone is thrilled… for that bombed out, rotten building (and about a dozen other ones all around) have now become a giant shopping mall with horrendous music, stale air and uniformly happy sales staff… even goofballs from EBRD showed up, taking grinning pictures next to Ronald McDonald and exclaiming “Europe is finally coming together” in thick German accents… the only ones unhappy are the town drunks… for what good are shopping malls to them – old rotten burned out buildings work much better for their purposes…
And that’s what my friend Matjaz is doing… building a better tomorrow… for the people of today… And I am jealous… for forget all the slogans and all the construction and all the investment and all the money… I want to know what the town drunks are doing, now that they’ve lost their base and home…
2 comments:
I've added a number by visiting your blog..42 people now...
nice going man! interesting posts...especially the profile one and Крокодил Гена тоже классный!
Read this post in the middle of a Cairo traffic jam... actually looked around to see if it was caused by a particularly stubborn mule :)
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